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Outlining Species: Drawing as a Research Technique in Contemporary Biology

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 April 2013

Barbara Wittmann
Barbara Wittmann*
Affiliation:
Bauhaus-Universität Weimar Email: barbara.wittmann@uni-weimar.de
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Argument

Biological drawings of newly described or revised species are expected to represent the type specimen with greatest possible accuracy. In taxonomic practice, illustrations assume the function of mobile representatives of relatively immobile specimens. In other words, such illustrations serve as “immutable mobiles” in the Latourian sense. However, the significance of drawing in the context of first descriptions goes far beyond that of illustration in the conventional sense. Not only does it synthesize the verbal catalogue of the type's morphological characteristics: it also enables the examination of these traits. The efficacy of drawing is thus closely related to its power to direct and redirect observation; it is inextricably bound up with the act of making a drawing. Although the invariance of the “immutable mobiles” is a key virtue of the logistics of “paperwork,” the recovery of graphic knowledge requires a much stronger dynamic activity – a process of sequential processing that brings out differences by translating the phenomenon under examination into various modes of graphic representation.

Type
Research Article
Information
Science in Context , Volume 26 , Special Issue 2: Knowledge in the Making , June 2013 , pp. 363 - 391
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2013

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